Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

September 28, 2020

The Hidden Oracle (Trials of Apollo 01) by Rick Riordan

Filed under: Reviews-Young Adult Fantasy — Suramya @ 11:57 PM

The Hidden Oracle (Trials of Apollo 01)
by Rick Riordan

Description:

He was once an immortal God. Now, he’s a teenage boy called Lester.

Apollo has angered his father Zeus for the last time.

So, how do you punish an immortal?

By making him human. Obviously.

Cast down from Olympus, he’s weak, disorientated and stuck in New York City as a teenage boy.

It’s the first time he’s been without his powers, and he has to survive in the modern world.

Which isn’t an easy feat for a four-thousand-year old deity, especially one with as many enemies as he has.

Apollo needs help, and he can only think of one place to go . . . an enclave of modern demigods known as Camp Half-Blood.

Buy From:

Rating: (4/5)

Review:

After finishing the previous books I was in mood for something light and happened to see the latest book in the Trials of Apollo in my feed. That made me realize that I had only read the first two books in the series and the 5th book had come out. So I started a re-read of the first two books while I wait for the remaining three to arrive.

The first book in the Trials of Apollo series has Rick’s trademark humor and it was a welcome break after the past few books I had been reading. The book is very light reading with a light-hearted view of the world. The lead character Apollo or Lester as he is now known after he was transformed into a mortal by Zeus is very narcissistic and only thinks about himself, however due to the way it’s written the character doesn’t cross the line into obnoxious which would have been quite easy to do. I loved how he keeps referencing popular culture and taking credit for major achievements like the songs Beatles wrote etc. Over the course of the book Apollo starts to realize that he was way too self centered and how unfairly the demi-gods were treated by the Gods.

Some of the Demi-gods from the Percy Jackson books & the Heroes of Olympus do make a brief appearance but some of them will have bigger roles to play in the future books in the series.

Over all this is a good fun book and a great beginning to a new series in the Percy Jackson universe.

Happy World Tourism Day 2020!

Filed under: Travel/Trips — Suramya @ 3:16 PM

Today is World Tourism day, 2020 and thanks to the current ongoing Pandemic we can’t really travel anywhere to celebrate it. In fact its been over 6 months since we traveled anywhere, so celebrating the World Tourism day in such a situation seems to be a bit of a downer. However just because we can’t travel somewhere doesn’t mean that we can’t celebrate the past trips we have done. So here are some of the Trips that Me & Jani took in the past 4 years:

There were a whole lot of other places we also traveled to which are not listed here, you can check them out here.

Hopefully things will improve soon and we will be back on the road visiting new places and experiencing the best the world has to offer.

– Suramya

September 27, 2020

Using ncdu to Check Disk Space Usage In Linux

Filed under: Computer Software,Computer Tips,Knowledgebase,Linux/Unix Related,Tech Related — Suramya @ 11:59 PM

One of the common tasks I face on my Linux system is to identify what files/directories are using the most space. The traditional way to find out is to go to the top level directory and run a ‘du -hs *’ (without the quotes) on the directory and then cd into each directory, rinse and repeat. The other option available is to right click on the folder in Dolphin or any other file manager and select Properties. With the same process as before when you go into each directory individually, right click and get the properties. This is very tedious and time consuming.

Instead you can use ncdu (NCurses Disk Usage) for looking at the storage space utilization on your computer as it has a lot of advantages. It is designed to find space hogs on a remote server where you don’t have an entire graphical setup available. It is fast, simple and very easy to use. I have been using it for a while now and absolutely love it.

To Install ncdu on a Debian system, you can issue the following command:

apt-get install ncdu

Once you have it installed, the usage it very simple. Simply open a command prompt and issue the following command:

ncdu

It will start in the current directory and index all the sub-directories under it. The initial scan can take a while depending on the size of the directories under the current directory. But its comparable to the time taken when running du -hs on the directory. Once the program completes its scan, you get a simple ncurses based interface that you can navigate using the keyboard.


ncdu display for my home directory

All directories & are listed with their sizes in human readable format sorted by size with the largest files & directories at the top (in the default view). You can go into a directory by selecting it and hitting enter. The sizes for the subdirectory are immediately shown without having to run additional commands. You can also delete directories & files from within ncdu by hitting the delete key which is a huge timesaver.

If you haven’t tried it out do check it out. You will love it.

– Suramya

September 26, 2020

Source code for multiple Microsoft operating systems including Windows XP & Server 2003 leaked

Filed under: Computer Related,Tech Related — Suramya @ 5:58 PM

Windows XP & Windows Server source code leaked online earlier this week and even though this is for an operating system almost 2 decades old this leak is significant. Firstly because some of the core XP components are still in use in Windows 7/8/10. So if a major bug is found in any of those subsystems after people analyze the code then it will have a significant impact on the modern OS’s as well from Redmond. Secondly, It will give everyone a chance to try and understand how the Windows OS works so that they can enhance tools like WINE and other similar tools to have better compatibility with Windows. The other major impact will be on systems that still use XP like ATM’s, embedded systems, point-of-sale, automated teller machines, set-top boxes etc. Those will be hard to upgrade & protect as is some cases the companies that made the device are no longer in business and in other cases the software is installed in devices that are hard to upgrade.

This is not the first time Windows source code has leaked to the internet. In early 2000 a mega torrent of all MS Operating systems going back to MS-DOS was released, it allegedly contained the source code for the following OS’s:

OS from filename Alleged source size (bytes)
——————— —————————
MS-DOS 6 10,600,000
NT 3.5 101,700,000
NT 4 106,200,000
Windows 2000 122,300,000
NT 5 2,360,000,000

Leaked Data from the latest leak


Alleged contents of the Torrent file with MS Source Code.

The leaked code is available for download at most Torrent sites, I am not going to link to it for obvious reasons. If you want to check it out you can go download it, however as always be careful of what you download off the internet as it might have viruses and/or trojans in it. This is especially true if you are downloading the torrent on a Windows machine. Several users on Twitter claim that the source code for the original Xbox is included as well, but the information is varied on this. I haven’t downloaded it myself so can’t say for sure either way.

Keep in mind that the leak was illegal and just because it has leaked doesn’t mean that you can use it to build a clone of Windows XP without written authorization from Microsoft.

Source: ZDNet: Windows XP source code leaked online, on 4chan, out of all places

– Suramya

September 25, 2020

Scientists find molecule to make bio-generated power more efficient.

Filed under: Emerging Tech — Suramya @ 10:06 AM

Producing Electricity is one of the great challenges of the modern world and We have been producing electricity by burning coal, using nuclear fission, Solar power, Wind Power etc etc for decades. However each of these have some drawback or other, and they are all not very portable. To power our portable devices & sensors we use batteries that are a big ecological issue as despite decades of effort most synthetic and molecular electronic materials remain bio-incompatible and nonbiodegradable. Plus the batteries only last for a limited time before needing to be replaced. Solar cells are good but don’t work at night plus we still need to store the power generated which brings us back to the battery problem.

Due to the above mentioned issues, we have been searching for new and improved ways to produce electricity that reduce the ecological impact of power generation. One of the ways explored is to use Microbial fuel cells powered by Bacteria, specifically Geobacter Colonies. Geobacter is a groundwater-dwelling genus of bacteria that lives in the soil beneath our feet and has the fascinating capability of producing electrons as waste much like how we humans generate CO2 while breathing. These electrons are then transmitted through what is essentially a giant snorkel of nanowire made out of a conductive material into the soil around the bacteria. In previous research, Nikhil Malvankar, an assistant professor at Yale University’s Microbial Science Institute in Connecticut and his colleagues found that when the Geobacter microbes are exposed to a small electrode in the lab they automatically assemble into interlinked piles of hundreds of individual microbes, capable of moving electrons through a single shared network. This substantially increases the amount of electricity produced by the microbes.

Now the question they had to answer was that how are the microbes able to transmit electrons through the interlinked piles efficiently so they set about using cutting-edge microscopy techniques to study the phenomenon. The first technique, called high-resolution atomic force microscopy, gathered information about the structure of the nanowires by touching their surface with an extremely sensitive mechanical probe and the second technique, called infrared nanospectroscopy used infrared light which was reflected off the nonowires to identify specific molecules. With these two methods, the researchers saw the “unique fingerprint” of each amino acid in the proteins that make up Geobacter’s nanowires.

During the study the team found that, when stimulated by an electric field Geobacter produced a previously unknown kind of nanowire made of a protein called OmcZ which is made of tiny, metallic building blocks called hemes. This new type of nanowire is over a 1,000 times more efficient in conducting electricity than the normal one. This new research has been published on Aug. 17 in the journal Nature Chemical Biology and it has paved the way to making the production of bio-electronics both cheaper and easier by increasing the power generated by the bacterial colony.

Once we figure out how to replicate this at scale then we will have the ability to generate sustainable power using just the microbes from beneath our feet.

Source: Scientists find ‘secret molecule’ that allows bacteria to exhale electricity

– Suramya

September 24, 2020

Can you spot a troll/bot account?

Filed under: Interesting Sites — Suramya @ 10:29 AM

Nowadays we have programmatic bots being used to spread misinformation & distrust on Social Media, in addition to the Troll’s who are just doing it for the lulz. A troll is a person who starts flame wars or intentionally upsets people on the Internet by posting inflammatory messages in an online community with the intent of provoking readers into displaying emotional responses for the troll’s amusement or a specific gain.

Can you identify these inauthentic accounts? Most people will say yes to the question but in reality it is hard to identify these accounts especially if they are run my competent people. spotthetroll.org is an online game that tests your ability to identify such accounts along with advice on what to look for when consuming Social Media. Its a great quiz and I found it to be quite fun, especially the section on what to look for when viewing social media to spot trolls/bots was very useful.

Each of the following 8 profiles include a brief selection of posts from a single social media account. You decide if each is an authentic account or a professional troll. After each profile, you’ll review the signs that can help you determine if it’s a troll or not.

I got a 5 out of 8. What’s your score?

– Suramya

September 23, 2020

Civvl is Uber for evicting people

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 10:16 AM

In the latest attempt by bottom feeders to capitalize on the current pandemic, we have a company called ‘civvl’ which calls itself, the Uber of Evictions. Basically this is a company which is coming in and saying, I’m gonna pay you money to go kick out people from their own houses. To rub more salt on the wound, they actually advertise that “this is a best time to get involved” and “it’s the fastest growing money making gig due to the COVID-19 pandemic” “Literally thousands of process servers are needed in the coming months due courts being backed up in judgements that needs to be served to defendants.” They use a standard language for gig works like flexible hours, be your own boss etc etc.

But imagine how heartless you have to be to literally start a company that will make money by kicking people out from their houses and capitalizing on the fact that the current pandemic will increase the number of people who will have to be evicted. When I initially read about the company I thought that it was a dark joke but unfortunately the company appears to be real and there are people who are signing up for it. I don’t blame them because you need to feed your family and you gotta do what you gotta do… But but coming up with this whole idea, I don’t have words to express myself right now. You need a special type of person to think of something like this and then implement it.

The company is based in the US and is live. I am not going to link to them because they don’t deserve any traffic and the owners need to seriously think about their life choices.

Source: Vice: Gig Economy Company Launches Uber, But for Evicting People

– Suramya

September 22, 2020

American Demon (Hollows 14) by Kim Harrison

Filed under: Reviews-Urban Fantasy — Suramya @ 11:01 AM

American Demon (Hollows 14)

by Kim Harrison

Description:

What happens after you’ve saved the world? Well, if you’re Rachel Mariana Morgan, witch-born demon, you quickly discover that something might have gone just a little bit wrong. That the very same acts you and your friends took to forge new powers may have released something bound by the old. With a rash of zombies, some strange new murders, and an exceedingly mysterious new demon in town, it will take everything Rachel has to counter this new threat to the world–and it may demand the sacrifice of what she holds most dear.

Buy From:

Rating: (4/5)

Review:

This book was a surprise because the previous book in the series ‘The Witch With No Name’ had the feeling of being the last book in the series when it was released back in 2014 with the Happy ending and all that. This book takes place events of the previous book & the happy ending depicted at its end. Since it’s been 6 years since the last book in the series was released I was happy that the book had a summary of the major event’s, players etc at the beginning to refresh my memory as otherwise I would have been lost trying to understand the plot of this book.

Between the Elves trying to retain power & wipe out the demons and the vampires trying to regain their souls Rachel’s hands are full. Plus the fact that she needs to hide from the Goddess while trying to solve her problems is just the cherry on top that she needs. However, with the help of her friends she navigates this mess nicely. The story is fast paced without feeling too rushed and there is a lot of grey area that Rachel needs to navigate.

The book is a good read but I would recommend reading (or rereading) the previous book before starting this one as this book will make a lot more sense if you do that.

Thoughts on a AmItheAsshole forum post and the racism it implies

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 10:15 AM

There is an interesting Subreddit, called r/AmItheAsshole (AITA) where people who are not sure if they behaved correctly in a given scenario can post the details of their experience/behavior and ask the Internet for a ruling on whether they behaved correctly or not. The questions can range from “AITA for not cutting my hair for my Sister’s wedding” to “AITA for burning my wife’s Ex-Boyfriend’s pics”. I don’t subscribe to the channel but there are folks I follow on Twitter who do follow and every once in a while they post links to specific posts which are usually way out there (the picture burning I referenced earlier is from one such post). Today I ran across a post where the poster was trying to justify his actions/behavior where he accused his GF’s Indian friend of cheating because she beat him in Scrabble and he couldn’t accept the defeat without assuming that she cheated. The whole post is below for reference:

So my (M23) GF (F23) has this Indian friend (F18) called “Priya”. Priya came to my English speaking country (relevant later) a year back to study. My girlfriend absolutely adores her and Priya soon became my GFs “best friend”. I’m doing English literature and she’s in science (also relevant).

Recently, she invited my GF and I to her place (fluid restrictions here), and had made a bunch of Indian food for us, got some wine. I ate well, the food was good and was having a good time. My GF had apparently bought Priya a scrabble set because Priya had mentioned she loved the game, so GF suggested we all played scrabble.

I was really excited because I knew I’d decimate them both easily. We play, and as the game progresses, it wasn’t me who was leading but Priya. She was making these huge words like “maladies” and “ostensibly”. I was pretty sure she was cheating.

She got up mid game to go to the bathroom and spent about 3 minutes there. I’m pretty sure she was googling words in there. So when she came out, I jokingly told her I knew she was cheating and she asked me what I was talking about.

I told her I know that she’s cheating, and that it’s impossible for someone who’s literally lived only in India all the time to be so good at Scrabble and to have such an extensive English vocabulary.

She didn’t say anything to defend herself but just laughed and told me she wasn’t cheating and we eventually finished the game and went home.

My GF however was extremely upset with me and told me I embarrassed her. When I told her I was being honest, and that there’s no way Priya could’ve beaten me without cheating, She told me I’m a racist and that she’s reconsidering her relationship with me.

So AITA?

The verdict of a majority of the commenters on the post is that ‘YTA’ (You’re The Asshole) and racist to boot. This is a problem I have seen many times when I was in the US and have actually had a person tell me in my Freshmen year (1st year of college) that I couldn’t possibly be from India because I spoke good English and people from India can’t talk in English. To which my answer was that I have been studying in English for the major part of my life and most schools in India teach in English so that the kids are prepared to enter the professional world once they complete their education.

Another instance was when a professor decided that I must have copied my homework paper from somewhere because it was too good to be written by an Indian kid in his freshman class. Luckily for me we had to write another in-class essay on a given topic before the homework was graded and returned. When he graded my inclass paper he realized that I had written both of them and he actually told me that he was going to give me a D on the homework assignment initially because he thought I had cheated but changed his mind after he saw my in-class paper.

There are many such examples, but they mostly have one common denominator: it is usually a White Guy who is offended by the fact that a non-white person beat them in something that they perceive is their forte. I loved the expression on their faces when they realize that they are not the best and it was especially fun in college because after the first year I was writing for the college newspaper & had published articles as well in recognized magazines, so when they found out about my articles it was always a priceless expression.

Have you faced similar issues in your life?

– Suramya

September 21, 2020

Flesh and Fire (Vineart War 01) by Laura Anne Gilman

Filed under: Reviews-Fantasy — Suramya @ 11:24 PM

Flesh and Fire (Vineart War 01)

by Laura Anne Gilman

Description:

Once, all power in the Vin Lands was held by the prince-mages, who alone could craft spellwines, and selfishly used them to increase their own wealth and influence. But their abuse of power caused a demigod to break the Vine, shattering the power of the mages. Now, fourteen centuries later, it is the humble Vinearts who hold the secret of crafting spells from wines, the source of magic, and they are prohibited from holding power.

But now rumors come of a new darkness rising in the vineyards. Strange, terrifying creatures, sudden plagues, and mysterious disappearances threaten the land. Only one Vineart senses the danger, and he has only one weapon to use against it: a young slave. His name is Jerzy, and his origins are unknown, even to him. Yet his uncanny sense of the Vinearts’ craft offers a hint of greater magics within — magics that his Master, the Vineart Malech, must cultivate and grow. But time is running out. If Malech cannot teach his new apprentice the secrets of the spellwines, and if Jerzy cannot master his own untapped powers, the Vin Lands shall surely be destroyed.

In Flesh and Fire, first in a spellbinding new trilogy, Laura Anne Gilman conjures a story as powerful as magic itself, as intoxicating as the finest of wines, and as timeless as the greatest legends ever told.

Buy From:

Rating: (2/5)

Review:

This is a book that I have read multiple times and I had loved it. This is the book that got me interested in Wine Tasting & the whole field of making Wine. I actually seriously considered doing a certification on Wine Tasting at one point in time.

I felt like reading something light and ended up picking this book again to read. Have you ever have it happen that you love a book and then you notice something in the book that completely spoils it for you? That’s what happened to me with this book.

I love the world setting and the details on how the magic works, however what destroyed the book for me was the fact that it appears to justify slavery as something that is required to raise people above their station & gain the power of magic. I didn’t notice it the last time I read the book but this time it was glaring enough that I couldn’t finish the book. Example quote from the book on this subject:

Vinearts did not appear full-blown from the earth, after all. It was an ironic gift from Sin Washer: generations of trial and error had proven that only the deprivations of slavery, the removal of all family ties and comforts, pushed a man to the point where magic would surface. Even now, he could not coddle the boy, or risk ruining him. The skills were inherent and easily proven by the first test, but the refining of them required a combination of elements. . . .Like the grapes themselves, a Vineart must be stressed to produce the finest results, grown in poor soil and subjected to the elements in order to shine.

Someday he would explain that to the boy and set him on his own course, to acquire and scour his own slave population for the ones he in turn would train, to carry on their tradition. But that day was years to come, assuming the boy survived. For now, they would begin as always.

This was not at all needed and this one paragraph ruined the book for me. If it didn’t have the slavery justification then I would have rated the book at 4 or 4.5 but with this in there, I don’t think I can rate it above a 2.

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